This article is part of our Museums special section about how artists and institutions are adapting to changing times.
When Daniel Merritt became chief curator of an art museum at 32, he did not expect his profession to require him — or the public — to put on skis. But last winter, Merritt, who works at the Aspen Art Museum in Colorado, couldn’t resist turning Ruthie’s, an abandoned restaurant on an Aspen Mountain ski slope, into a temporary exhibition space.
Collaborating with Aspen One, the company managing the property, he organized “Alex Israel: Heaven,” a show of Israel’s life-size cutout portraits of celebrities who had died since the debut of Instagram, including Tina Turner and Sean Connery. The exhibition drew about 5,000 schussing visitors over its 19-day run.
“Going up the lift in a blizzard was intense,” Merritt recalled in a video interview. But, he added, “I moved here and fell in love with skiing, which I think also was what drove me to start thinking about things that were literally off the beaten path.”
Presenting the unexpected — although not necessarily from a high altitude — is a mission among a group of younger professionals in museums nationwide. Having become associate curators or full curators before turning 40, they are helping institutions broaden their audiences and their collections, ushering in new modes of storytelling, and focusing on populations and cultures that were previously ignored. They are helping to redefine not only what an exhibition can be, but also what an artwork is.
“Curators in the past used to primarily take care of the paintings, the objects, whatever was a part of a museum’s collection,” said Minna M. Lee, interim executive director of the Association of Art Museum Curators. In recent years, she said, they “have spent more time trying to show material that sometimes reflected the community” of museum constituents — a movement often led by younger people.
Maritza M. Lacayo, a 34-year-old associate curator at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, said she tried to allude to the city in every show she organizes. For “José Parlá: Homecoming,” an exhibition by a Miami-born Cuban American artist that runs through July 6, Lacayo proposed recreating Parlá’s studio inside the museum. She wanted to celebrate his work — colorful, large-scale paintings often inspired by the city’s graffiti-covered walls — after his recovery from a life-threatening illness.
“We had him finish one of the paintings in the gallery,” she said in a phone interview. “We’d never done anything like that before.” So for one weekend last fall, visitors watched Parlá create.
“I wanted the community to see what I’ve seen and to understand these paintings at a deeper level by watching him actually perform,” Lacayo said.
According to the curators’ association, the population of young professionals is rising. Today, the average age of the association’s new members is 34.9, versus 41.7 in 2015. In 2005, it was 58. One factor that may be fueling this trend, Lee said, is the growing interest in art of the African, Asian and Latin diasporas, which is often “driven by young people.”
It is a field that inspires not only Lacayo but also curators like Ashley James, 38, an associate curator of contemporary art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, who last year was selected to organize the 2024 Kingston Biennial, a Jamaican showcase of Caribbean diasporic work.
For the young seeking to climb the curatorial ladder, more museums and organizations also now offer internships — often paid.
“Here, we have been working hard on that pathway that connects from high school all the way through young curators,” said Ian Alteveer, the Beale family chair of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
A small museum without a permanent collection, like the Aspen, where Merritt said he had a collaborative relationship with the director, Nicola Lees, can sometimes offer a faster route to a senior position. And a few years ago, even the august Metropolitan Museum of Art reduced the 14 years of service it required for an employee to rise from assistant curator to full curator.
“That’s too long a stretch of time for people to be getting ready,” said Andrea Bayer, the Met’s deputy director for collections and administration.
“So it’s now a 10-year period,” she added in an interview, “and people who are hired are given credit for work that they’ve done elsewhere.”
Experience outside of museums can also enhance a career trajectory. Lauren Rosati, 39, an associate curator of Modern and contemporary art at the Met, began organizing experimental-music events when she was still in graduate school. Her goal now is to get museum visitors not only to see art but also to hear it.
The latest example is Jennie C. Jones’s “Ensemble,” the museum’s new roof garden commission, which opened on April 15 and features three powder-coated aluminum-and-concrete sculptures that are inspired by stringed instruments.
One “is modeled on an Aeolian harp, which is an instrument that is designed to be played by the wind, and we have heard it singing upstairs,” Rosati said. Recently, she arranged for two musicians to be filmed while playing music on the sculptures’ strings; the video is on the museum’s website.
Rosati, who has also helped reintroduce film programming to the museum, said she wanted to expand “the visibility and scope and potential for media and performance at the Met, including sound and sound technology.”
At the Guggenheim, Alexandra Munroe, senior curator at large, global arts, said she had often sought to hire younger curators for their knowledge of areas of scholarship that were only just developing, like contemporary Asian and Asian American art.
“One thing that the younger curators bring us, of course, is artists of their own generation,” she said in an interview.
Munroe’s staff includes Kyung An, now 39 and curator of the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Initiative. An oversaw the museum’s first acquisition of a video work by the transgender Asian American artist Wu Tsang, as well as a show of experimental Korean art. Also head of the museum’s Global Exhibitions Initiative, An is focusing on organizing touring shows that reach across disciplines and encapsulate the Guggenheim’s identity.
As a young professional in a museum’s long-established system, “you have the ability to interrogate that a little bit and disrupt it, if possible,” she said. “With a lot of respect,” she added with a laugh.
Carrie Dedon, 37, the associate curator for Modern and contemporary art at the Seattle Art Museum, always considers an audience that naturally disrupts the status quo: children.
As the museum’s only curator with offspring under 5, she often works with its education department to make sophisticated shows more inviting to the smallest visitors. “Poke in the Eye: Art of the West Coast Counterculture,” which Dedon organized last summer, featured audio guides in the form of 1960s-era phones and a huge table holding touchable clay. But Dedon noticed that her daughter, then 3, would never be able to reach the table the museum installed.
“‘Can we just put a stool in the space?’” Dedon recalled asking her colleagues.
“Because I have kids at home, I’m seeing those things,” she said.
Although many young curators are drawn to Modern and contemporary art, they are also making an impact with work that is centuries old.
“I’m by no means an expert on every object that I curate,” said Courtney Harris, 36, an associate curator of decorative arts and sculpture at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “So I try to keep that in mind as I write labels, and I think about using a conversational voice.”
Harris, for instance, recently acquired for the museum’s collection an 18th-century Dutch ceremonial goblet inscribed with a toast to good trade. In writing the label for the glass, which will soon go on view, she started not with scholarly details but with a question: “Do you think this deal went well?” The text asks visitors to reflect on how they celebrate successes.
To connect the museum to the public, Harris has also relied on a favorite tool of her generation: social media. For “Tiny Treasures: The Magic of Miniatures,” a 2023-24 show, she and the exhibition designer, Luisa Respondek, created videos of Harris’s fingers handling some of the objects, which instantly revealed the artworks’ scale. The material went viral; one video, of an 1853 patent model library step-chair, became the museum’s top Facebook post ever, with 1.6 million views. It earned 2.35 million on Instagram.
Another young curator, Ross Patterson II, has helped shed light on a subject many museumgoers think they already know: World War II. Patterson, 35, is lead curator of the new exhibition “On American Shores: The Aleutian Islands Campaign” at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. The show focuses on American efforts to regain Alaskan territory that the Japanese captured in 1942.
Those battles are not frequently discussed, said Patterson, whose father’s great-uncle served in the Aleutians. While organizing the show, the museum’s first on the campaign, he said he wanted “to bring forward some of these stories that are often forgotten.”
Illuminating neglected stories and revealing new ones is a purpose these curators said they embraced, whether forging a first-time partnership with an institution in Asia or discovering an artist close to home.
“I think young voices are critical in shaping the discourse on our history, on contemporary ideas, on who gets to be heard, and who gets to speak,” Rosati of the Met said. Young curators, she added, “are critical in that debate.”
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